Is this our last Vietnam novel? One has to wonder. “We're on the cutting edge of reality itself,” says Storm. Given the covert nature of much of the goings-on, perhaps it is necessary that characters become blurred. Has a flaw, it is that some characters are virtually indistinguishable. A large cast of characters, some colorful, some vaguely chalked, surround this triad, and if Tree of Smoke
He's a soldier-scholar pursuing theories of how to purify an information stream he bloviates in gusts of sincerity and blasphemy, all of it charming. Skip is mostly in the dark, awaiting direction, living under an alias and falling in love with Kathy while the Colonel deals in double agents, Bushmills whiskey and folk history. Skip is a CIA recruit working under his uncle, Francis X. Readers familiar with the Vietnam War will recognize its arc-the Tet offensive (65 harrowing pages here) the deaths of Martin Luther King and RFK the fall of Saigon, swift and seemingly foreordained. President Kennedy had been killed”) to 1970, gets its own part, followed by a coda set in 1983. In Johnson's honest world, no one story dominates.įor all the story lines, the structure couldn't be simpler: each year, from 1963 (the book opens in the Philippines: “Last night at 3:00 a.m. the real point is the possibility of grace in a world of total mystery and inexplicable suffering. , novels like Resuscitation of a Dead Man
As with all of Johnson's work-the stories in Jesus' Son Jimmy Storm, whose existence seems to be one long vision quest. If this novel, Johnson's first in nearly a decade, is-as the promo copy says-about Skip Sands, it's also about his uncle, a legendary CIA operative Kathy Jones, a widowed, saintly Canadian nurse Trung, a North Vietnamese spy and the Houston brothers, Bill and James, misguided GIs who haunt the story's periphery.
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